The emergence of a new means of narrative happens, on average, about once every twenty-five years or so. This is a very inexact estimation, about as inexact as my definition of “narrative means.” Let’s just say that the means is the way in which a person receives their stories. So, for instance, in the 20th century, there were three big ones that emerged. First, there was film. Then came television. And then came video games. You could maybe also argue that comic books constitutes its own system but there have been serialized adventure stories with illustrations for quite awhile so is that really its own narrative conveyance? You can see what I mean about inexact. But so anyway, the point is that each of these systems came with their own rules and parameters and ways in which they function in partnership with the human brain and it took awhile for everyone to figure it all out. We’re still figuring it out. We’re definitely still figuring it out when it comes to virtual reality. The entirety of the field currently has the spastic, lurching, excitable quality of a baby first learning to walk. There’s a lot that remains to be seen and plenty of ways in which we can hurt ourselves. This makes it even more important that we begin to consider and experiment with virtual reality as a storytelling system, to discover its rules and parameters, and to figure out exactly what it’s capable of.
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I: It’s All A Dream
The best way to describe the virtual reality that Oculus Rift and other headsets offer to their users is that it feels like a dream. Which is kind of an obnoxious thing to say since dreams are about as subjective an experience as one can find. The fact that they cannot be shared first-hand and that their very hazy and fragmented nature makes them hard to describe second-hand, means that any attempt to universalize the experience is going to feel silly and insulting to just about anyone. And so in the history of narrative, dreams have proven themselves to be incredibly tricky. Most narrative depictions of dreams end up labored and shallow, half-cocked attempts at weirdness that mask the absence of that essential, particular, very complex weirdness that each dream has for each dreamer. But for as much as a dream is intensely personal, there are also consistencies in each person’s relationship to their dreams. They function as everyone’s own metaphor-making machines and so there is the sensation, for instance, of viewing everything through some kind of interpretative filter; some very thin membrane. From behind that membrane, you can see and hear everything on the other side and yet your ability to interact with any of it is both mediated and shifting constantly. Sometimes it feels as if the membrane is totally impermeable, as if you’re just a witness to events beyond your control, as if you’re just watching a story unfold in front of you.
Other times, you may feel involved, as if a direct interaction between you and the dream-world is vital to your understanding. Yet the course of this interaction seems just out of your control; someone else talking with your voice, moving your limbs. Your relationship to all of it is intimately distant. You can’t help but be present there, and yet just far enough away to also feel detached.
Cinematic virtual reality and the head-mounted devices that deliver it to us mimic these sensations better than any narrative mode that exists. Some of this is by design, inherent to the basic premise of virtual reality. A real environment filmed in 360-degrees and then essentially placed on to the head of a user for that user to explore both visually and sonically, is both fabricated and yet real in its expansiveness and subjectivity. It finds a line that only dreams had found before and it straddles that line. And of course, some of the similarities are due to the technical limitations that the field is still working through.
There will come a time when one’s interaction with a VR environment isn’t as mediated and limiting as it sometimes is now; when you can touch and speak and fully exist within that environment; when the membrane is all but gone. And when that day comes, it will be truly exciting and yet also maybe a little bit sad.
Some of the world’s greatest, most enduring stories describe for us what it feels like to live behind that membrane. To live as if inside a dream or to live as a ghost or to just live alone, separate and separated from the rest of the world. As we explore narrative in cinematic VR, its ability to recreate those experiences begins to define its potential power.